Explosive, Daring Cosmos Just Launched a New Crusade for Science

COSMOS: A SPACETIME ODYSSEY: More than three decades after Carl Sagan's groundbreaking and iconic series, "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage," it's time once again to set sail for the stars. Host and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson walks across the Cosmic Calendar, on which all of time has been compressed into a year-at-a-glance calendar, from the Big Bang to the moment humans first make their appearance on the planet in the all-new "Standing Up in the Milky Way" Series Premiere episode of COSMOS: A SPACETIME ODYSSEY airing Sunday, March 9 (9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX and simultaneously across multiple U.S. Fox networks, including National Geographic Channel, FX, FXX, FXM, FOX Sports 1, FOX Sports 2, Nat Geo Wild, Nat Geo Mundo and FOX Life.

Image courtesy of Fox

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Explosive, Daring Cosmos Just Launched a New Crusade for Science

COSMOS: A SPACETIME ODYSSEY: More than three decades after Carl Sagan's groundbreaking and iconic series, "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage," it's time once again to set sail for the stars. Host and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson walks across the Cosmic Calendar, on which all of time has been compressed into a year-at-a-glance calendar, from the Big Bang to the moment humans first make their appearance on the planet in the all-new "Standing Up in the Milky Way" Series Premiere episode of COSMOS: A SPACETIME ODYSSEY airing Sunday, March 9 (9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX and simultaneously across multiple U.S. Fox networks, including National Geographic Channel, FX, FXX, FXM, FOX Sports 1, FOX Sports 2, Nat Geo Wild, Nat Geo Mundo and FOX Life.

Image courtesy of Fox

On Sunday night, viewers saw the first episode of a followup series, Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, hosted by astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson. It had been nearly 35 years since Carl Sagan inspired a generation of scientists with 1980's 13-part series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Immediately, one thing became clear: This is not your parents' Cosmos.

The ideas and driving principles behind it are the same, but along with its new host, Cosmos has new urgency, and a new edge. Sagan's Cosmos was awash with dream-like wonder, as personal as its title implied, colored by Sagan's agnosticism. Tyson's is different: informed by a generation of additional understanding and discovery – and special effects too, it's faster, brighter, and more explosive – and more daring in its evangelism for science.

Sagan's approach to science education was personal, almost intimately so. In contrast, Tyson has mastered the art of communicating his passion for ideas without exposing much about the man behind them. Tyson has gone to great lengths to avoid identifying with any specific ideological groups — he's famous for saying that the only "-ist" he identifies as is "scientist" — and he's long argued that science itself is fundamentally apolitical.

There comes a point, however, where the choice to present the universe through an evidence-based lens is itself a political act.

We live in an era where the very concept of truth is politicized; where policy-makers and voters and journalists stand in denial of demonstrable science in favor of magical thinking and faith; where science warped by dogma is given equal footing in classrooms and Congress; where "teaching the controversy" forces educators to lend false weight to bad science in the name of religion and tradition. And that has cost science the luxury of neutrality. In choosing to argue actively for science, without apologies or appeasement, Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey has thrown down a gauntlet.

But it might not be the gauntlet you expect.

Most of the controversy and criticism that's arisen around the first episode of A Space-Time Odyssey surrounds the choice of 16th-century philosopher Giordano Bruno as the first historical figure for the show to highlight. Bruno was a philosopher, not a hard scientist, and as Tyson points out, his theory of a heliocentric solar system and infinite cosmos was a lucky guess rather than the result of concrete evidence or research.

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Image courtesy of Fox

The value in Bruno's tale — and its relevance to Cosmos — lies in what it says about science in a social and cultural context. In a recent interview with Space.com, Tyson emphasized that the show's historical profiles exist not only to highlight the discoveries of scientists, but also "what comes when those [discoveries] encountered the social, political, cultural and religious mores of the day."

Bruno's story, then, is less about a specific scientific discovery than the curiosity — and willingness to challenge the reigning philosophy of the time — that enables science. It's about the moral and human imperative to discovery, even in the face of opposition, and testament to the power of imagination as a catalyst for exploration. That Bruno's view of the cosmos happened to be correct is incidental: what matters is that there, as elsewhere in his heretical philosophy, he dared to question rather than bow mindlessly to tradition.

It would have been easy to frame the segment as anti-religious, and it's certainly been decried as such by some religious blogs, but that criticism is short-sighted — and it misses a larger point.

Giordano Bruno saw his cosmology as an expression of his faith, inextricable from his belief in the scope and grandeur of God; that's a fact that Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey revisits again and again. But the conflict between Bruno and his oppressors isn't one of science versus faith. Faith was not an end in itself for Bruno — it was a doorway to further understanding and enlightenment.

That ability to challenge and question lies at the heart of science, and at the heart of Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey. "Science, as it is communicated to the public typically, is through the lens of discovery, but in fact, science is a process," Tyson told an audience last July. "Science is what you do in the lab. Science is the wiring of your brain and how you look at the world because of that wiring. It's not the result. It's not just an answer. It is a process. And you need to learn to love the questions themselves. And when you do, the universe is yours."

That, ultimately, is the stand Cosmos has taken, and the line it has drawn: to take an active role in becoming what Carl Sagan described to us 35 years ago as "a way for the cosmos to know itself."

The second episode of Cosmos: A Space-Time OdysseyCosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey airs this Sunday night at 9 pm EST/PST on Fox and other affiliated networks (FX, FXX, Nat Geo, and others).